


Those Below

by SpoonerizeSwiftness (SplickedyHat)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Because He Is So Deep In, Denial, Gen, Gross Medical Shit, He's In Danger Of Being Eaten By Crocodiles, Hornrubs, Hurt/Comfort, Illustrated, Karkat Hates Himself, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Pre-Relationship, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-22
Updated: 2014-10-24
Packaged: 2018-01-13 08:19:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1219165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SplickedyHat/pseuds/SpoonerizeSwiftness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s so light when you get your arms under him and lift him up.  There’s no weight to him, just gangly little limbs and his chest rising and falling like a frightened small animal—tiny, shallow, pointless little gasps.  You should.  You should leave him, or cull him even, he’s not just sick he’s a runt and an idiot and way, way too nice even after you scream at him every time you talk to him…</p><p>“We’re going home,” you say again, and he makes a noise you trained yourself not to make five sweeps ago—a wrigglerish little whine, tired and grateful.</p><p>“…’kay bro,” he mumbles into your chest, and curls up as tight as he can against you, huddling up into your arms.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have given up on needing to justify what I want to write. What I want to write is pale sickfic with big, buff, hit-my-growth-spurt-early Karkat and tiny little malnourished itty bitty skinny Gamzee. So I'm going to write that, because I want to. UwU  
> It's very zen.

You know something is wrong from the first sentence.

Not just because of the long silence preceding it, although that’s pretty weird all on its own; Gamzee is an absent-minded shit-panned chuckle-fuck but he pings you almost every night , and he never misses more than one in a row. 

But it’s weirder than just that.

You’re streaming a movie on your terrible, glitchy internet when it happens—and you have no choice but to go answer, the fucking chat client slows your download to a crawl

[ _terminallyCapricious began trolling carcinoGeneticist_ ]

TC: s.,mn

And then, with that enigmatic statement…silence.  You stare at the chat client, but he doesn’t sign off and he doesn’t say anything else.  Maybe he passed out on his keyboard.  It’s…honestly almost a relief to hear from him.  Life was weird without Gamzee to yell at.

CG: WHAT DO YOU WANT, BULGE-WHEAL? 

CG: I WAS STARTING TO THINK YOU CRAWLED OFF INTO A CORNER AND DROWNED YOURSELF IN THAT SHITTY SUGAR-WATER YOU’RE ALWAYS SWILLING.

More silence.  But then, just when you’re about to close the client, your husktop chimes.

TC: br o innnnnnnnnnnnnnmmmmklk

CG: WHOA, WHAT THE FUCK.

TC: sodfssty i cnat

TC: i

CG: GAMZEE?

TC: s;sldkmehings wron g i c

TC: can t

TC: help

—

It’s not hard to figure out where Gamzee lives, and even better, it’s not far away at all.  You’re inland, but the ocean is close enough for you to get icy wind and weather changes so abrupt it’s like the sky is vacillating red and black for the puny trolls down below on the planet.  More importantly, it’s close enough for you to get there before midnight if you hurry, and it doesn’t take you through any crowded residential areas.  It’s about as safe as being out at night can be.

You pack a sun-cloak, a water bottle, a grubloaf and an extra sickle, just in case, and set out running.

You’re more out of shape than you thought—or at least, your body isn’t used to all the extra muscle and weight you’ve been putting on recently.  You’re pretty winded by the time you reach the top of the cliff, look down, and see a hive that’s actually  _smaller_  than yours, set out on the beach in the middle of the sand like an ink-blot on a fresh piece of paper.

The only way down is a really winding path on the cliff-face, which is thankfully pretty low here, compared to the soaring bluffs further up the beach.  You zig-zag your way down, sliding some of the way, and then land hard on the shifting sand and advance cautiously, eyes on the ocean.  You have a thousand sweeps of history pounding in the back of your pan,  _STAY AWAY FROM THE OCEAN, DON’T TOUCH THE WATER_  and your neck is sweaty and prickling.

The door is open, the windows are dark.  You realize all of a sudden as you edge through the dark doorway, sickles at the ready, that he might not even still be alive—he’s just dumb enough he might have been under attack and trolled you in a panic instead of fighting back. 

The thought is…it…it makes you angrier than you thought it would.  He’s an idiot, but he wasn’t a bad guy and he never pissed off anybody on purpose and he called you his best friend and if some asshole killed him—

Then you step on a horn and scare the shit out of yourself.

By the time you’re done flailing and swearing and slashing at the darkness with your sickles, your eyes have started to adjust a little bit to the shadows.  You can see the faint gleam of the moonlight on hundreds of pointless little dumbass clown horns, lying all over the ground, an empty pie tin on the counter with a crust of bright green slime inside—is that sopor?  That’s sopor.  God, even _wrigglers_  know better than to eat that stuff, let alone shove it in their face by the pie-full.  You knew he ate it, but you figured it was a handful here and there—

Something honks a horn.  This time, it’s not you.

You raise your sickles again, suddenly reminded that if someone has come in here and killed him they’ll probably still be here, and they have the element of surprise on their side.  You’ve got a bunch of new bulk from your most recent growth spurt, but you don’t really know how to use it to your advantage yet and really the best you can do with it is to loom and be intimidating.

That would be more effective if you had bigger horns.  You hate to admit it, even to yourself, but it’s true.

More quiet honks.  They’re closer than you thought…

You glance down at your feet, and almost scream again from pure shock.  There’s a troll lying on the floor of the block, so close in a few steps you would have walked right on top of him.  He’s curled up, arms wrapped around himself and legs pulled up to his chest, draped in a black shirt and baggy pants that are far too big for him.  The honking is coming from the pile of horns he’s lying in, next to the recuperacoon instead of in it like he started to go to sleep and collapsed before he could make it there.  You pick your way forward cautiously; he doesn’t seem to be moving, maybe not even conscious.

“…Gamzee…?”

He stirs a little, which is a good sign, you guess.  You get a glimpse of the sign on his shirt and it certainly looks like he right color of purple, although that doesn’t mean much if someone killed him and took his hive—purples and indigos and all those assholes kill each other and camp out in the wrecked hives all the time. 

“Gamzee?” You repeat, and he takes a deep breath and it’s a horrible noise, a tight little rasp that makes your chest clench up. 

“ _Karkat_?” he says, very, very quietly.  He sounds numb and distant—but somewhere under there, he sounds scared, too.  His voice sounds…bruised.  Croaky and painful. 

“Why the hell aren’t you in your ‘coon, you idiot?”  You ask him, and he twists a little bit to look up at his recuperacoon. 

“… _’s so motherfucking—far away,_ ” he says plaintively, and lolls his head around to look at you instead.  “ _Bro_ ,” he says, and it’s a weak, whispery little wheeze.  He coughs, hard—an angry, bubbling noise—but nothing comes up.  “… _hey…_ ” 

“You look like shit,” you tell him, and risk another few steps closer.  He’s…shaking, all over.  Shivering.  You can’t see his face very well in the darkness and with the stupid-ass clown paint smeared all over it, but you  _can_  see how sallow his cheeks are, how skeletal his hands are.  He’s clutching at himself, huddling inwards like he’s freezing cold. 

He’s much smaller than you thought he would be, too.  You’re big, like,  _really_  big for your age; at six and a half sweeps you were always going to be bigger than a slow-growing highblood.  But it’s not that you’re big and he’s small compared to you, it’s that you’re big and he’s built like a chirpbeast.  He’s at least a head shorter than he should be at his age, with wrists you could probably break between your thumb and forefinger and fangs and eyes too big for his face. His horns are flakey and yellow and brittle-looking—too little of the wrong kind of food—and you wince, imagining how easy it would be to slam those against something and do irreparable damage.

“ _I,_ ” he starts, and starts coughing again, those rough, catching, pointless rasps that clear nothing out and make his eye leak purple tears.  By the time he’s finished, his whole body is spasming with every cough, and he’s shaking even harder.  He slumps back, exhausted and you should be disgusted by how openly  _weak_  he’s being but somehow you can’t find the hatred in you anywhere.  It’s just Gamzee.  Just stupid Gamzee who chats with you every day and believes life will be okay because of miracles and treats everyone like they’re the best person in the world.  He looks like a handful of crumpled twigs and messy hair and too-big clothes, and you can’t bring yourself to use the sickle clenched in your hand.

Instead you lean down and get on your knees next to him.  If he had any sense, he would be nervous—people tend to get a little bit nervous the first time they meet you, surprised to find out you’re not (in Sollux’s words)  _a scrappy little loud-mouthed asshole compensating for height with his over-developed squawk-blister_.  But Gamzee just smiles up at you, taking wheezy little gasps for air.  When you reach out slowly and pick up one of his limp, tiny hands, he feels cool to the touch but no cooler than…Kanaya maybe, or Terezi.  This close, you can see where sweat has smeared his paint, although he’s not sweating now—he should be freezing compared to you, but he’s just clammy, warm to the touch and shivering.

That’s fucked up.

“… _’s so cold, bro_ ,” says Gamzee really quietly, and shudders all over.  He half-lifts himself on trembling arms, like he’s trying to sit up—but his arms give out and he tumbles forward instead and lands heavily across your knee.  He tries to push himself up again, but his arms won’t support him and instead he curls up around your knee, like he’s trying to press as much of his skin as he possibly can against your warmth.  His teeth are chattering, catching on his lips, staining his fangs with purple blood.

You glance back at the door, and then up at the fenestrations as more cold sea air comes whistling in.  He has no way to close the fucking things, it’s cold as fuck in here and he’s panting against your knee in these sharp little huffs of air that take something deep in your pan and twist at it. 

“I’m taking you back to my hive,” you tell him, and he coughs once, a reedy little noise.  He’s sinking into weird, bleary torpor, too exhausted from shivering and coughing and no food and no water to keep himself awake. 

He’s so light when you get your arms under him and lift him up.  There’s no weight to him, just gangly little limbs and his chest rising and falling like a frightened small animal—tiny, shallow, pointless little gasps.  You should.  You should leave him, or cull him even, he’s not just sick he’s a runt and an idiot and way, way too nice even after you scream at him every time you talk to him…

“We’re going home,” you say again, and he makes a noise you trained yourself not to make five sweeps ago—a wrigglerish little whine, tired and grateful.

“ _…’kay bro,_ ” he mumbles into your chest, and curls up as tight as he can against you, huddling up into your arms.

You were worried that carrying him would get harder as you went, but he doesn’t move around too much and he remains as skinny as a four-sweep-old and way too light as you haul yourself up the side of the cliff again and head off towards your hive.  You spend most of the trip back planning what you’ll do if someone attacks you—you’ll have to either dump him or throw him over one shoulder or something, holding him like this is hindering your ability to either attack or defend—but nobody does.  It’s a silent night, a little too cold for most of your warmblooded hivecluster, and nobody is out except you.

When you get back to your hive Gamzee has woken up, just a bit; he groans as you dump him onto the couch, and blinks up at you with this big, dumb smile on his face.

“ _Karkat,_ ” he says, and that’s it, that’s all he’s got in him.  Then he just kind of rolls over, huddles up on your couch, and goes back to shivering.

You stare at him, lying there on your couch, for all of about four seconds.  And then you bolt.

—

[ _carcinoGeneticist began trolling twinArmageddons_ ]

CG: SOLLUX I’M KIND OF FREAKING OUT.

TA: ehehehe you’re alway2 freakiing out.

TA: what’2 2o 2peciial about twoniight?

CG: I JUST GOT TROLLED BY

CG: I HAD TO GO AND

CG: FUCK, I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK I’M DOING, OH GOD, I’M FREAKING OUT RIGHT NOW.

TA: what the fuck?

CG: I’M A FAILURE OF A TROLL.

TA: not arguiing, but why exactly?

CG: I SHOULD HAVE JUST KILLED HIM OH GOD.

TA: KK, lii2ten really clo2e riight now, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKIING ABOUT.

CG: I JUST DID SOMETHING UNBELIEVABLY STUPID AND

CG: SHIT I HAVE TO GO, DAD IS SCREECHING AT ME.

You get downstairs and your already dismal mood plummets even further.  Crabdad, apparently pissed off by the  _obviously_  hostile pile of scrawny, wheezing clown on your couch, has picked Gamzee up by one leg and is running around screeching.  You can’t tell if Gamzee is even conscious or not—if he is, he’s not trying to struggle, just flopping around limp as Crabdad skrees and waves him at you.   _YOU’RE IN TROUBLE, YOUNG MAN_.

“Put him  _down_!”  You howl at him, and he skirrs at you and clicks the claw not fastened around one of Gamzee’s skinny ankles.  “He’s a friend, okay?  God!”  He doesn’t let go—you stomp forward and punch him hard in the muzzle.  All you get for your troubles is a bruised fist—

Oh, no, wait.  He just dropped Gamzee on the couch again.  He’s chittering and snapping his claws, looking upset, and you roll your eyes at him.  “No, I don’t care!  He’s not culling anybody, okay, he’s a complete idiot and he’s so sick he can’t even move!  God, dad, stop embarrassing me!”  He hisses.  You grab a roe cube out of your sylladex and lob it towards the ablution block and he races after it, hissing. 

You glare after him for a few seconds, making sure he stays gone, and then go back to the couch and your unexpected visitor.  He’s lying where your dad dropped him, sprawled halfway over the arm of the couch with his head lolling back so you can see the entirety of his skinny throat.  The  _vulnerability_  of it all makes your fingers twitch—not to do anything, just from nerves, the knowledge that right now his life is in your hands.  He’s definitely not conscious. 

He’s.  Not actually breathing.

In retrospect there is probably a better option than punching him hard in the stomach and then grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him, but you’re panicking and you don’t have time to go look it up.  Anyway, it makes him gasp in a big breath of air and then start coughing again, and by the time he settles down you can at least be sure that he’s alive and for now he’s going to stay that way. 

You need somebody who knows what they’re doing.

—

[ _carcinoGeneticist began trolling adiosToreador_ ]

CG: NITRAM I NEED TO TALK TO YOU AND I SWEAR TO GOD IF YOU PRETEND YOU’RE NOT ONLINE I’M GOING TO COME OVER TO YOUR HIVE IN PERSON AND BEAT YOU TO DEATH WITH YOUR OWN RETARDED USELESS STRIFE SPECIBUS.

AT: }:(

AT: tHIS CONVERSATION IS, sO FAR, nOT ONE OF MY FAVORITES„,i WOULD SAY, pERSONALLY SPEAKING,

AT: wHAT DO YOU WANT,

CG: YOU KNOW HOW TO TAKE CARE OF SICK ANIMALS, RIGHT.

AT: tHAT IS, aN AREA THAT I HAVE SOME PROFICIENCY IN I GUESS,

AT: i HAVE TO FIX MY ANIMALS A LOT SOMETIMES WHEN THEY’RE HURT AND MOST OF THE TIME THEY LIVE, sO ‘YES’ IS PROBABLY WHAT I’M TRYING TO SAY?

CG: THANK YOU FOR THAT SUMMARY, IT’S SO MUCH FUCKING EASIER THAN INTERPRETING YOUR GODAWFUL STUTTERY BULLSHIT.

AT: oKAY, i AM NOT FEELING ALL THAT, uH, eNTHUSIASTIC, aBOUT THIS CONVERSATION IN GENERAL,

AT: oR THE WAY YOU KEEP SAYING THINGS, tHAT I DON’T ENJOY HAVING SAID ABOUT ME,

AT: sO I ANSWERED YOU AND NOW I’M GOING TO GO, oKAY,

CG: WAIT!

CG: IT’S BEEN A REALLY LONG DAY, OKAY.

CG: I’M SORRY.

AT: }:o

CG: I ASKED BECAUSE I

CG: I NEED YOUR HELP.

—

By the time you sign off he’s insisting that he’s going to come over, and you don’t have the energy to tell him all the reasons that’s an absolutely terrible fucking idea.  If he finds out about your blood—well, he’s a cripple.  You can just.  Just kill him. 

But he tells you what to do while he’s arranging it with whoever is going to help him get over here—Megido, you think?  Or Sollux or something, he’s got connections, apparently.  He says he isn’t as good with sick animals as injured ones, and sometimes when that happens he just has to take it out back and let it go to sleep, }:(.  But he also says you should make sure to get ‘it’ as much water as you can, cover it if it’s shivering, and try to cool it down if it’s sweating. 

(Troll fevers are pretty vicious things, although obviously to you they are just something that happens and nothing to get too worked up about.  If you were a weaker species, you’re pretty sure you wouldn’t be able to handle the vicious efficiency of your body’s regulatory processes flinging you from heat to cold and back again, and maybe you would only usually go through the cycle once, and slowly, like a wimp.  But instead your body throws itself at the breaking point again and again until either it breaks or the sickness does.)

(Trolls infections sure are nasty.)

You…never actually mentioned that it wasn’t actually an animal that you were taking care of, so you just have to hope to god that the advice Tavros gave you works on trolls as well as it works on animals.  Gamzee was shivering before, but now he’s back to sweating—and he’s smearing paint across your couch, goddammit.  You’ll have to clean that off of him in a minute here, but first—you don’t know when the last time he had a drink was, but his coughing still has that dry, bubbly noise to it and your throat feels parched and raw in sympathy. 

You go hunt down a glass that isn’t completely filthy and ferry it back into the entertainment block, keeping a sharp eye out for your custodian.  Thank god, he doesn’t seem too keen on aggressing again tonight.

In the end you have to kind of prop Gamzee up on your knees to get him drink, and he doesn’t want to cooperate.  He shoves at you weakly and begs you to get his dad, looking right past you at pictures inside his own fucked-up pan.  ( _His dad always comes when he’s drowning.  He needs his dad.  He needs his dad, please, where’s his dad_ )  He’s surprisingly strong for being as small and thin as he is, and it’s a struggle getting him to lie still and get the cup to him.

He calms down when you get the water to his lips, though—he come back to the present enough to lean up a little and reach up towards the cup, trying to get you to give him more, faster.  (You don’t let him.  The last thing you need is him pouring water all over both of you and drowning himself.)  He drinks the whole thing down and whines when you pull the empty glass away, but the sound is a little stronger, less hoarse and raspy.  You feel absurdly proud of yourself. 

“I’m going to go get you more water,” you tell him—if he hears you he doesn’t respond. 

He drinks six more glasses of water before he starts to slow down, all apparently without waking up, and his labored breathing quiets a little.  Okay.  So he shouldn’t, like,  _die_  if you leave him for a little bit, right?  You’ve got a second.

You have sweeps’ worth of standard cheap shitty medical equipment, drone-delivered every few perigees to make sure the idiotic new cohort of wrigglers learns some basic combat aid skills and doesn’t get an infected papercut and die of sepsis or anything before they can be sent out to kill and die for the empire.  You only have to use your supplies once in a bilunar eclipse, so you have plenty of everything.  Even if most of it is for patching up injuries, and even more of it is expired.  You find a temperature grub, and jog back downstairs again.

In the time that you were gone, Gamzee has feverishly thrashed himself off of the couch and is curled up on the ground in a heap of too-big clothes and sweat.  There is a great, ugly slash of grey and white paint on your couch to show where his dripping face smeared down onto the ground, which does not do any good for your benevolent feelings toward him. 

You know basically shit-all about medicine, but even you can tell that the way he’s hunched up isn’t doing him any favors; he’s making little jagged noises, like he’s trying to cough but he can’t quite find the strength for it.    You grab him and haul him back up onto the couch, glower at the paint all over your stuff (how is there still any on his  _face_  when there’s so much smeared all over everything else?) and then give up, and go get water and a rag.

And then you set them down by the couch, look down at him, and you stall again.  Making sure he doesn’t die, sure, that’s pretty hate-friendly of you, but cleaning him up when he’s lying semi-conscious and totally vulnerable, in  _your_  hive—it feels like taking advantage.  You can’t shake the feeling that this makes you the asshole who goes to cull-parties and fucks kids who are too doped up on intoxicants to see straight. 

But his paint is smeared beyond recognition anyway and he…he did _ask_ you for help.  He didn’t mind when you told him you were taking him back to your hive.  He seemed happy to see you, he came to _you_  for help when he finally realized something was seriously fucked up.

If it turns out you’re the scum of Alternia you’ll just have to apologize later, you guess.  The cold water seems to do him good, anyway; he makes a tiny, rattling sound deep in his chest, and you’re worried for a few seconds until you realize, with a resurging jolt of absolute, miserable shame, that he’s unconscious and exhausted and trying to purr.  You almost stop cleaning him up—but he’s half clean anyway, and fuck, it seems to be making him feel better. 

You’re a terrible person, because when he turns his face into your hand and sighs you feel so fucking  _needed._

__

His face looks even worse with the paint taken off; you can see the massive, bruisey purple shadows under his eyes now, and the hollows of his cheeks are even more pronounced.  When was the last time he remembered to eat something?  God, no wonder he caught something, living out by the ocean and not eating and no lusus—

You literally slap yourself in the face.  You’re making this whole fucked up situation bad enough as it is, the last thing you need to do is sit here and list in your head all the reasons his life is shitty.  That’s dumb and would make no sense.  You’re  _trolls._   Fucking—you’re— _trolls_ , okay, if he’s got a fucked up life he should be dealing with it, and if he can’t you should be culling him, not wiping ugly cult paint off his face and hoping he keeps breathing.  Doing anything but putting him down when he’s  _this_ sick is…is edging into territory that’s really not platonic, oh god.  No.  Nope nope nope—

Your private panic attack is cut off before it can really gain any steam, because for the first time Gamzee turns his face away from your cold rag and mumbles something indistinct and unhappy.  His eyes are halfway opened again; they’re bloodshot and watery from coughing, and he doesn’t seem to see you.  A moment later, you understand his sudden aversion to the cold water; while you were distracted, he’s started trembling again.  You can see his thin, pointy shoulders hunching and his arms rising weakly to curl around himself, and you make a split second decision from the deepest, most primal part of your tired, overworked pan. 

You reach out, stopping his arms from rising (it’s so easy, way too easy) and pull him close instead, feeling simultaneously bizarrely protective and like the worst kind of trash imaginable.  He’s not quite as small as he looks, it’s not as easy as it seems like it should be and his arms and legs twitch weakly and escape your hold, but he’s not fighting you on purpose anymore and finally you get him bundled up to your chest.  He makes another one of those strange, animal sounds that you only usually hear wrigglers make—a sort of painful clicking whimper down deep in his chest—and pants against your collarbone.  Coughs.  Groans in pain.  Goes back to struggling for air. 

His skin still feels way too warm for a purple-blood, but he presses up against you, soaking up the warmth, shivering.  He’s clammy with cold sweat.  Give him a few minutes, he’ll be too warm again.  Which reminds you…

You reach down, not letting go of him, and pick up the temperature grub that you brought downstairs with you.  When you jostle him a little to get your other hand out from under him, he turns over and mumbles something that you think might have your name in it.

“Feeling any better, nookmunch?”  you inquire, kind of more acidly than you intended to.  He groans and takes a single long, slow breath, and then goes tense and shivery again and goes back to shallow little gasps.  Not better enough that he’s registering reality yet, apparently.  You’d almost like him better if he was completely unconscious—as it is, he keeps moving and drifting and saying bits of things you can barely understand.  It makes you angry.

(Well, it should, anyway.)

You wait for maybe another fifteen minutes, give or take (and maybe doze off once, sue you) and…yeah, there he goes.  You can feel his pump-biscuit racing and he whines and pushes himself away from you, abruptly miserable in contact with your body-heat.  Fortunately, quite apart from making him even more talkative and noisy (it’s fucking  _embarrassing_  how vocal he is, like a grub or something)  the heat also makes him go limp, momentarily relieved from the cold.  You take advantage of that the haul him bodily into a sitting position and pull his huge shirt over his head. 

Nothing you wouldn’t have guessed at.  The sharp dips of his thoracic struts and the few soft, silvered lines of scars, almost white against his skin—he also stinks, rank with sweat and sickness, and you wrinkle your nose as you pick up one loose, bony arm and stick the grub under it.  He jumps and whines when it nips his side, just deep enough to get a taste of his blood, adjusting the measurement for temperature, and then you just sit back and wait for it to work.

The stupid thing is old, so it takes way longer than normal to work.  When it finally darkens to black you pry it away from him, count the chirps in half a minute, multiply (the fuck do these things need so much math) and in the end you get…175.

The troll brain dies of the cold at 0 and the heat at 200.  It’s a simple scale, because it turns death into a simple, round number (who the fuck would base a scale off of anything else, anyway?) and what it’s making  _simple_  for you right now is that in a couple more heat-notches Gamzee is going to cough and shiver and sweat his way to brain death.  He shouldn’t even be  _awake_  right now, he should be in a coma, like seadwellers go into when they have to spend too long around hell-vents on the ocean floor and they pass out from the heat.  But here he is, even managing to fuck up the basically unfuckable process of being mortally sick.

Fucking incredible.

And then you hear your door open.  Crabdad starts hissing again—and then, abruptly, he goes quiet.  Instantly you’re upright, bristling, drawing your sickles and padding, as silently as you know how, towards the entrance to your hive.  You’ve had to fight a few intruders before, but yoru dad shouldn’t have just shut up like that, something’s not right—

“…Karkat?”

Okay, that’s weird.

You don’t put your sickles away, but you advance cautiously on the door to the entry block.  Crabdad is blocking your view, but you can see two pairs of black and silver wheels, and a pair of thin, wasted legs in patched-up lowblood jeans. 

You put your sickles away. 

“You got here fast,” you call over your dad’s head, and Tavros Nitram edges around your lusus, patting his gleaming white flank affectionately, catches sight of you and does a double take.  You kind of do too; from the way he talks, everything about how he acts, you would have figured he was as tiny and scrawny as Gamzee, stuck in his chair.  But instead you’re facing a troll who, standing up, might be even taller than you, with horns so big they look photochopped on.  His legs are pretty scrawny from disuse, but above the waist he’s built like a brick shithouse.  On top of the whole ridiculous picture there’s a big, mild sort of face, with sad, round, moobeast eyes that are already starting to tint brown.

He stares at you with an infuriatingly mild expression of surprise plastered all over his face until you get tired of sizing each other up and go back to glaring instead.

“I thought maybe your lusus was sick,” is the first thing he says to you, and he glances back over his shoulder—you duck forward past your dad just in time to see a flickering, dark shape vanish off into the sky in a halo of reddish-white light.  AA then.  You don’t talk to her too much—she always tries to get you to ‘come out of your hive and have an adventure! 0u0’  Way too excited about death.  Not the worst asshole you know though, all things considered.  “…but there’s nothing wrong with him that I can see, which is nice.  I was worried.”  He stares around—yeah, compared to his place, even your hive must be pretty nice.  His allowance is about as shitty as you can get.  “..so…uh…where—?”

“In here.”

He follows you down the hallway with your dad trailing behind him, bonking his huge white head on the back of the four-wheel device to beg for chin-scratches.  Nitram puts his fingertips up to one temple—your dad scuttles off again, leaving you alone. 

“Could you  _not_  mind-control my dad,” you growl, and he blinks at you, surprised, and then looks immediately chagrined.   _Honestly_ , too, like he’s not just putting it on. 

“I thought it was, uh…the easiest way to avoid anything bad happening,” he explains.  “…like, my four-wheel device getting turned over or anybody else’s lusii coming over to see what was happening.  I don’t like dragging myself back into my four-wheel device—without my legs, since the disuse of my legs is what makes me need it in the first place—it’s not fun.  Even though I’m technically totally able to do it…?”

Huh.  The muscles in his arms and shoulders suddenly make a bit more sense. And so does his decision to commune with your lusus, although it’s still not your favorite idea and kind of makes you want to punch him in the face.   “Just…don’t,” you grumble, and let it go. 

He follows you into your block and looks around, confused, when you don’t lead him any further.  You can see him start to open his mouth, probably to ask some bullshit question, and you point, wordless, towards the couch.  

He frowns and wheels forward, and then, finally, notices the scrawny figure curled up on your furniture, making noises like a death-rattle every time he breathes.  “Holy  _shit_ ,” he says, staring.  “You said, uh.  You said it was an animal.”

“No,” you correct him, “I asked if you knew how to take care of a sick animal, I didn’t say that was what I had.”  He keeps staring.  You stand there like an idiot.  “…he’s all the way up at fucking 175,” you point out after a few seconds, and he jumps and then nods. 

“I.  Okay.  Uh.”  He takes a deep breath.  “I.  I’m not.  I don’t take care of trolls, Karkat—”

“Neither do I,” you point out, “—but you wanna call a professional mediculler in here?  They’d cull him as soon as they saw him.”

“Is there, a specific reason that we care?”  Tavros says pointedly, and you’re just trying to think of a good answer to this really reasonable question when pushes himself a little closer and takes a better look. 

His eyes go round. 

“—wait,” he says, and for the first time there’s a hint of urgency in his voice.  Yeah they’re hate-friends too, right?  Writing godawful slam poetry and talking about fairies or whatever the fuck it is they do.  “Karkat, do you—is that—Gamzee?”  He glances back at you, and apparently figures out the answer from your face. 

The stubborn tension in his shoulders breaks. 

“…what did he do to himself,” he asks, and you know by the resignation in his voice that you’ve secured your—um.  Medical expert.  Give or take.  A true leader has to know how to work with the resources he has on hand, okay, even if his resources consist of a crippled brownblood whose only mediculling experience is on the wrong species.

“I don’t know.”  You glance over—Gamzee provides an extremely helpful groan and a few nasty, crackling breaths.  “…he didn’t troll me for a few days, probably because he felt like shit, and then all of a sudden early tonight he started talking to me again.  Looked more like he was banging randomly on the keys than typing, so I figured he was probably just being a moron like he always is, but it ended in ‘help’, so I went out to see what was up.”

“That was…really brave and adventurous, as well as kind of stupid of you,” says Tavros, and then goes back to worrying over Gamzee while you’re still snarling at him.  “—he sounds, uh…really  _really_  bad.”

“No shit.”

“You got him some water, right?”

“Yeah.” 

“Okay.” He says again, and you get the impression he’s trying to give himself time to think and calm down more than actually leading up to something.  “…uh.  He.”  He stares for another few seconds, frowning, with a weird, pensive expression on his face that you can’t really quite make sense out of.  “…he’s…he’s really small, isn’t he?”

He is.  Even smaller, with his paint and his shirt off—he’s a tiny, miserable, malnourished sack of shit and for some dumbass reason that means you have to make him better. 

“…Yeah,” you say, and leave it at that.

You glance at each other and then away again, and you refuse to think about what that look probably meant.  Do you even know what it meant?  What if he thinks he knew what it meant and you have no idea?

Gamzee interrupts your increasingly circuitous pointless wondering by going into another coughing fit.  The water you managed to get down his throat did… _something_ —his coughing is still crackly and bubbling but it’s not as dry, and now he’s making some really terrible, wet noises.  Tavros winces a little bit and starts wheeling forward. 

“…at least he’s not going to make as much, uh…gross, shitty lung stuff as a bull-roarer or a horsaroni,” he says philosophically.  And then,   “…he shouldn’t be lying down.”

“What? Why?”

“Because, uh…” Tavors makes a vague motion towards his thorax.  When this doesn’t automatically enlighten you, he tries again.  “—because your…your aeration sponges, like…they can’t get as much air in, when you’re lying down.  Do you have something I can lean him up against?  And some kind of bowl, or, a container of some kind…?  All the gross stuff that’s making him make those noises is trying to come out and I don’t think you want that…everywhere.”

A bit of digging around provides some squishy, slightly mauled comfort pads and a bowl that crabdad apparently stashed behind your entertainment center.  Gamzee starts coughing again when you have to move him—whatever it is he’s bringing up out of the depths of his infected lungs, Tavros was right.  You definitely don’t want it all over your block.  It makes you sick to your stomach to look at, and there’s a tint of purple to it that has to be blood and a nasty, greenish color to the rest of it.  Tavros shoves the pads in behind him as fast as he can and you drop him, still coughing, back against them.  The sound is terrible; jagged, bright and wet, almost like the sound of cloth tearing. 

You  _see_ the same thing happen to Tavros that happened to you; his face goes embarrassingly soft, and he reaches down and picks up one of Gamzee’s hands in his.  His hands are as huge as the rest of him, calloused roughly on the palms where he holds his lance, and he can wrap his fingers around Gamzee’s wrist and have room to spare.  You imagine the damage he could do if he squeezed, and have a sudden, mad urge to snarl. 

“He even feels kind of warm to me,” says Tavros, and frowns, worried.  “That’s really not a good thing at all.  You have cold water still, right?  And we need to make him keep coughing, too.”

Making him keep coughing is the absolute last thing you want to do.  Tavros must see that in your face, because he makes an apologetic sort of frowning, shrugging motion.  “…he needs to get all the gross, uh, slimy stuff out of his lungs.  Or else he’ll drown I think, and I like Gamzee. I mean I don’t want to watch him cough like that, but I also don’t want him to drown in his own lungs.”

He makes a convincing argument.  You, in the meantime, are out of your depth and hating it, and the water and the rag you used to wash off Gamzee’s face are still sitting next to the couch and you can almost  _feel_  Tavros wondering when he glances over at them.  You are the most disgusting piece of shit.  It’s you. 

“I guess what we need to do, then, is.  Um…” Tavros sits back and starts listing on his fingers.  “—try to keep him from frying his pan, or being cold…give him a lot of water, and get rid of the stuff he coughs out.  And we need to keep him from trying to get up.”

“Why the fuck would he try to get up?”

Tavros shrugs again.  “I had a howlet once that got a fever,” he says, and taps his forehead.  “…I could feel her trying to get up and fly away.  Looking for a nest.  She fell out of the air, uh…” his face falls.  You think you can guess what happened to his dumbass fiduspawn monster.  “…fevers do weird things to your thinkpan.  He could, decide he needs to go and run around outside to get some air, or I had a rumbleroll once that seemed to think its own legs were an enemy and started tearing them off—or he could go upstairs and try to fly off of something?  We just need to keep him from going anywhere.”

The horrible mental image of Gamzee tearing off his own limbs in a feverish frenzy is made worse by the fact that when you look at him with dismemberment in mind you feel like you could snap him apart with a couple of claws.  You make a mental note to not leave him alone in one of the fever stages, like,  _ever_.

Then, from upstairs, you hear a distant  _ping_.

“Oh, fuck,” you groan, and rake your claws through your hair—Tavros glances up at you, surprised.  “Ugh, some shithead is trolling me, what the fuck, it’s like…almost day already!”

“Morning is a pretty, uh…a pretty reasonable time to troll somebody,” says Tavros, way too reasonably, and you hiss at him.  “You should go get it, I think.  If you got the right temperature off of the grub he shouldn’t even be in the really really bad part of the sickness much longer, but, uh, I’ll make sure he doesn’t do anything bad to himself.  I mean, in a not pale way, of course.”

“Why the fresh hell would I care what fucked up quadrant you wanted to drag him into?!” you snap, and he raises his eyebrows and shrugs at you.

You stomp out, fighting the feeling that you just lost a fight, and go deal with whoever is trolling you at this  _totally ungodly hour._

—

[ _arsenicCatnip began trolling carcinoGeneticist_ ]

AC: :33 < *the bright-eyed mother lioness drops a gift of fresh meat on karcat’s doorstep, and scratches to be let in!*

CG: HOLY FUCKING SHIT THERE COULD NOT BE A WORSE TIME FOR THIS.

CG: IF YOU DON’T HAVE SOMETHING WORTHWHILE TO SAY IN THE NEXT THREE SECONDS I AM BLOCKING YOU, MY FINGER IS RIGHT THERE ON THE BUTTON.

AC: :OO < no, wait!

CG: WHAT.

AC: :33 < i have a message i need to give you!

CG: WHAT KIND OF MESSAGE?

AC: :33 <its from uh

AC: :33 <well, just a friend!

CG: I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANYTHING THAT SWEATY ELITIST SPHINCTER-STUFFING DOUCHEBAG HAS TO SAY ABOUT LITERALLY ANY TOPIC UNDER THE MOONS.

AC: :33 < it’s about gamz33.

CG: I WOULD RATHER

CG: I

CG: OH.

CG: …

CG: WHAT DOES HE WANT?

AC: :33 <well he’s not exactly being clawr about that. :(( 

AC: :33 <here, let me show you.

AC: CT: D—> Nepeta I require your assistance in a small matter of no real importance.

AC: CT: D—> Please do not respond with any form of roleplaying, I am rather concerned about this, in a manner that does not at all impact its standing as a matter of no real importance.

AC: AC: :33 < *the

AC: AC: :33 < oh.

AC: AC: :33 < well okay then, I guess.  i will hold off on the roleplaying fur now. what do you knead?

AC: CT: D—>I require you to contact the…lowblood.

AC: AC: :33< which lowblood, silly?  you call all of us that. ;33

AC: CT: D—>You will desist making that detestable, 100di% winking face at once.

AC: CT: D—>Uh

AC: CT: D—> …Vantas.

AC: AC: 8OO < oh my god, fur real?!

AC: CT: D—> I do not practice the art of insincerity for my own amusement Nepeta, we have discussed this at length.

AC: AC: :33< well okay then, but only if you have something nice to say!

AC: CT: D—> you must ask him whether he has had any contact with the highb100d.

AC: AC: :33< gamz33?

AC: CT: D—> that is indeed the highb100d I am referring to.

AC: AC: :33< well…okay, ill ask him.  but you owe me one! :33

AC: CT: D—> No.

AC: AC: :33< yes!

AC: CT: D—> No.

CG: GOD OKAY, STOP, I DON’T NEED TO READ FIFTEEN MINUTES OF YOU TWO HAVING YOUR STUPID, POINTLESS YES-NO-YES-NO FIGHTS.

AC: :33< okay okay.  well, that’s what he said.

CG: HE WANTS TO KNOW IF I’VE HEARD FROM GAMZEE? WHY THE FUCK WOULD HE WANT TO KNOW THAT?

AC: :33< ummmm

AC: :33< don’t ever tell him i told you this, but

AC: :33< Equius trolls gamz33 efurry single day to tell him how much he hates him :oo

AC: :33< and gamz33 always answers, every single time, except all of a sudden he hasnt been and my dumb meowrail is too stuck up to ask you himself. XCC

CG: …WELL…

CG: YEAH, OKAY. THAT’S KIND OF CREEPY AND GROSS, AND I’M PRETTY SURE HE HAS ABOUT AS MUCH OF A CHANCE OF GETTING GAMZEE TO ACT PITCH FOR HIM AS I DO OF FUCKING THE EMPRESS, BUT OKAY.

CG: BUT WHY ME?

AC: :33< because gamz33 talks to you more than anybody, silly! :33 and he likes you a lot, he talks about you all the time!

AC: :33< …hello?

AC: :33< karkat?

CG: YEAH I’M

CG: I’M HERE.

AC: :33< what’s the matter?

CG: NOTHING’S THE MATTER, OKAY, I’M FINE.  AND GAMZEE IS

CG: NOT DEAD.

AC: 8OO< not dead?!  karkat, whats going on?!

—

You proceed to tell her what’s going on.  It takes longer than intended, even though you always try to be as brief as possible with everything, of course.  But one of the good things about Nepeta is that when you’re telling a story, she’s really impressed by all the right parts and she doesn’t jump in and interrupt like some of the douchebags you have to talk to on a regular basis, and she just kind of…pulls the story out of you, a little bit at a time.  She’s a mistress of prying things out of people by aggressive listening, is the fucking problem.

When you’re done telling a slightly edited version, where he passed out without his face paint on and you covered him up with old clothes instead of wrapping him up in your body heat, she makes lots of impressed emoticons at you and tells you that you’re really brave and she’s glad you got there on time. 

You…would maybe not be  _too_  upset if she knew about the stuff in your story you glossed over, but every time you consider owning up to being way too pale with somebody who’s not even awake…you remember she’s 100% sure to tell her creepy fucked up moirail about the whole thing.  You keep your trap shut and stick to the bare minimum.

She still signs off with a “ _;33 < take care of him, okay?_”, and you glower at that little winky face for about a minute and a half before you pry yourself up off of your computer and head back downstairs again. It’s light outside, and you are fucking exhausted. 

You register something is different the minute you walk back into the block, noticing dimly that somebody stops talking quietly as you walk in.  And it takes you a second to realize that the coughing has stopped. 

Gamzee is sitting up—not just sitting up, he’s been doing that since Tavros got here and helped you prop him up, but sitting up and looking around.  He looks like grim death warmed over, but he’s not coughing or choking or sweating or actively dying.  His eyes widen a little when he catches sight of you in the doorway, and he swallows hard and smiles at you. 

“ _Hey_ ,” he rasps, a little wobbly and really weak, but clear enough.  One hand is pressed to his chest and he winces a little with every breath, but he’s actually looking at you, and not somewhere else inside his own head.  You’re not really sure what to make of the look on his face.  It’s…scaring you a little bit, for reasons you’re not sure you understand.  “… _hi_ ,  _bro_ …I—”

“You shouldn’t try to talk too much,” Tavros points out, and Gamzee opens his mouth, closes it again, nods.  He looks absolutely terrible, exhausted beyond exhaustion and still like a half-starved piece of cull-bait with the Handmaid’s needles on his throat, but he’s awake and some of the weight that has been pressing down on your thorax until now lifts off.  He coughs some more—it’s still wet and horrible, but it doesn’t go on and on and on.  He gets it back under control and whines, hunching down on himself in pain. 

“About time you woke up,” you tell him, for want of something better to say, and then scowl when Tavros throws you a surprisingly dirty look over Gamzee’s head.  Okay fine, maybe now is the time to be a  _little_  bit nicer than you normally are.  You sigh and lower your voice a bit.  “…we didn’t think you were making it through for a bit there.  What did you even do that got you fucked up so bad?”

“I think,” says Tavros, and both of you turn to look at him.  “…I would say, looking at what happened, and, I guess, the color of the stuff you were coughing up—it looks like you breathed in some sopor slime by accident.”  You wince, and remember the horrible green and purple stuff in the bowl.  God.  “It would also be, uh…why you don’t remember the first couple of days where you weren’t talking to anyone, because I guess you were probably passed out?  We just got here right at the end when it got really bad, really.  It’s a good thing Karkat brought you back here.”

“Yeah, I’m fucking charitable that way,” you snap, half a joke.  “I love having pan-dead clowns wheezing and smearing paint and coughing their lungs up onto my furniture, it’s like a fucking hobby.”

There’s silence, and you realize all of a sudden that Gamzee is hunched down again, ears flattened and every line of his skinny body tight and unhappy. 

“… _c’n go home now_ ,” he says, really quietly. “… _’f you want_.”

Oh, shit.

You stare at him, and then at Tavros, who stares back at you and silently judges you while pretending to not care, the passive-aggressive little shitwad—and then back at Gamzee, hunched on your couch and still making soft, rasping noises when he thinks you’re not listening to him, determined to please you even if it means staggering off into the dark to try to find his hive without falling over and coughing himself to death.

You take a deep, deep breath and let it back out again. 

“You’re not going anywhere, you slurry-panned disaster,” you tell him, as firm as any good future leader should be.  “You’re staying right here, and we’re going to cure the shit out of you.”

He stares up at you with wide eyes and then, slow and shaky and bright, he smiles. 

You’re pretty sure you’re going to be okay.


	2. Past Karkat is a Massive Pervert.

[ldefix](http://ldefix.tumblr.com/post/89245764793/this-is-definitely-just-hatefriends-platonically) drew me something for my birthday okay THIS IS NOT MY FAULT. (no ILU you're wonderful <3 <3 <3) 

* * *

 

One of the first things you notice about Gamzee, after he finally gets strong enough to start walking around, is that his horns are so far overdue for a polish they’re leaving flakes in every corner of your hive and all over your nice clean(ish) floors.  They’re flaky and peeling and yellow, but you can see a gleam of darker orange underneath the new layer, coming in stronger and cleaner after you made him actually eat  _food_  for a few weeks.  

You give him like three nights after you notice to get his shit together and take care of them himself, but the longer the wait the more sure you are that he has literally no idea what he’s doing.  If you let him sit he’ll just wait until the dead layer falls off on its own or something even though it literally takes all of half an hour to  _clean up your goddamn horns._

So you get everything you need together, you march into the entertainment block where he spends most of his time, and you stomp up in front of them and drop them in his lap.

He looks down at the stuff in his lap, then up at you, then back down at it again, and there is not even the slightest hint of comprehension in his eyes.

“They’re for horn-polishing,” you say pointedly.  “You had an excuse when you had the plague but now’s the time to clean your shit up.  Go on, get to it.”

He stifles another cough—the sickness has been holding on like a parasitic pan-sucker with a grudge and every time you just about manage to convince yourself you should send him home, he starts sleeping badly and coughing again.  You’ve never met a troll with a thorax as weak as his.  Okay, so maybe referring to the plague in past tense is a little bit preemptive, so sue you.  He’s still strong enough to look after his own horns.

He picks up a buffing cloth and looks at it dubiously, then up at you, then back down at the cloth.

“…so…” he reaches up and pokes at his own horns uncertainly.  “…so I just…?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake.”  You give up and flop down on the couch next to him, beckoning him.  “Get over here you hopeless sack of shit, I keep forgetting you don’t know shit wrigglers learn in their first schoolfeeding.”

He scoots over to you and lays down kind of cautiously with his head on your leg, and you grab him and start in on one horn before you can think too hard about this.  You only realize how rough you’re being when he yelps and jerks—oh  _shit_ , yeah, even with the new layer they’re still stupidly thin and soft,  _ugh_.  They have to be sensitive as hell, you can’t just scrub away at them like you’re cleaning a stained nutrition plateau.

The words  _sensitive as hell_  roll themselves around in your pan just long enough to make your face so red you feel like you’re going to explode into a miniature galaxy of sparkling stars of shame, just so your constellations can twinkle out  _KARKAT VANTAS IS A PERVERTED, DISGUSTING EXCUSE FOR A TROLL_ to whole planets of wrigglers for generations to come. 

And then you try another stroke, gentler this time, and his whole body goes slack.

“ _Oh,_ ” he says, very soft and simple, like you just laid the secrets of the universe bare to him all in one fell swoop.  He sounds  _very_ pleasantly surprised.  “O-oh, oh,  _fuuuck,_ wow—”

You take your hands away again hastily, and he stops making those little  _noises_ —but he also opens his eyes and looks up at you like you just stabbed him in the back.

“Oh— _fine,_ ” you snap at him, and tweak the tip of his ear.  He yelps.  “But stop  _groaning_  like that.”

“Can’t hardly—” he starts, and then you touch his horns again and he chokes and stutters.  “—c-can’t— _hhh—_ shit—sorry, I, I—” his voice dies off in—yeah.  Another one of those aching little groans, god, he sounds like he’s about to cry.

If he actually starts crying you are  _leaving._

“You have to take better care of your horns,” you tell him, and he makes a distant sort of “…mmm…?” noise and presses back up against your leg until his head is all the way in your lap.  Holy fuck, does he not even  _get_  how much you’re taking advantage of him right now?  You are the grossest trash that ever lived and past Karkat is a massive pervert for going through with this and trapping you in this fucked up awkwardness.  Ugh, Gamzee really needs his hair washed.

...wait.

No.

No, fuck no,  _he_  needs to  _wash his hair_ , the previous phrasing is stupid and wrong and a big-ass flashing YOU’RE A SHITWAD sign in letters as gaudily ugly as your blood color.  He can wash  _his own goddamn hair_ , holy shit, he can actually do things for himself!  He just…doesn’t. 

“You need to wash your hair,” you tell him, and thank god he doesn’t open his eyes, because you can tell just from the feeling of it that your cheeks are bright red.  You work at the flaky, rough surface at the tips of his horns, putting off the inevitable, revealing a layer of deeper, healthier gold underneath.  “You can do that yourself, I’m not doing it for you.”

His forehead furrows worryingly like he wants to object for a second, but you reach down and squeeze right at the base of one horn, a touch vindictively, and he just makes an undignified choking noise. 

You work in silence after that for a while, trying to ignore the little noises he makes that get louder the further down his horns you work.  It would be calming work if it wasn’t so  _fucking embarrassing_.  You’d figured it would take longer to do his horns than it does to do yours (duh) but you hadn’t figured it would take this long.

By the time you get right down to the base of his left horn he’s completely limp, and you can hear the soft, swelling thrum of a purr every time he breathes.  He’s wearing one of your sweaters, you notice suddenly—you already knew it, but you notice it all over again.  The sleeves hang right down over his big, knobbly knuckles and the hem goes most of the way down his thighs.  You saw a setup like this in a movie once—

You recall abruptly where the scene in that particular movie ended up going, and accidentally slap yourself in the forehead so violently you elbow Gamzee in the side of the head.  He doesn’t even  _twitch._   Just goes “… _mmn_ ,” and snuggles up a little closer to you. 

“Honestly, it’s ridiculous that you get such nice horns and you never take care of them,” you say grumpily, instead of stopping and listening to the way he’s purring and looking at the totally blissed-out expression on his face.  If he’s even conscious enough to hear you, he doesn’t answer. 

By the time you’re halfway down his other horn, you’ve gotten, if not used to it, then at least embarrassed enough that there’s nowhere else to go from where you are.  His horns are a lot shinier and smoother, there are chips and flakes of pale, yellowed horn on your lap and he looks so calm you think he might have fallen asleep in your lap.  You have the time, now that you’re not dying of humiliation, to notice how his horns are so much more ridged than your small, smooth ones, and how even down at the base where the blood is closer to the surface and the horn is warmer, it still feels strange and cool.

You can feel the root of his horn, too—if you press a little and follow it down, ignoring his little grunts and sighs when you do, you can even imagine you feel the faint seam under the skin where his horns connect to his skull.  There’s a bump on the side of his head, and he winces a little when you press on it—maybe where he cracked his head when he fell down, almost completely gone but still just barely bruised.  A faint scar on his temple that just barely cuts across the corner of one eyebrow, almost invisible to your eyes but clear enough when you run your fingertips over it.  A crookedness to the bridge of his nose that makes you think it’s been broken before, a spatter of freckles so faint they’re almost invisible, spread across the ridge of his jutting cheekbone…

You blink and you have a hand cupped on his face, a thumb rubbing gently back and forth over his cheek.

You jump up so fast his head slams into the cushions and back away from him like he's a bomb about to explode.  He chokes and starts coughing again from the shock, but as you back away from him towards the door he manages to sit up and looks up at you with watering eyes, feeling around at his own newly-polished, shiny horns.

“Holy shit,” he says, and smiles at you big and broad and guileless.  “Thanks, bro!”

You leave with your face flaming hot, and your fingertips still tingling from the cool hum of his skin as he purred.


	3. A Little Ball of Clown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked Suckedylit:  
>  Ok but hear me out for a sec: Those Below Karkat falling asleep and Gamzee getting cold or somethin idk and just curling up in a little ball of clown next to him gOD I'M HAVING FEELINGS IMAGINE WHEN KARKAT WOKE UP
> 
>  
> 
> (You don't have to ask me twice, anon. *u*)

Karkat is all settled down there on the couch where he gone and took care at you, and you can feel in your bones how all that give to him is so warm and how he’s soft on the outsides and all solid inside-like and so nice to lean on.  He yells at you when you get your cuddle on while he’s awake, but he can’t get all shouty and mad at you if you just warm up a bit on him while he sleeps, right?  

Be real nice if you could get him to do what he did at your horns again too, but whenever you try asking that at him he does motherfucking yell and he gets real salty at you and calls you a pervert and shit.  Not… _real_ sure what that means, but if a pervert is a brother as gets Karkat’s hot big hands rubbin’ so gentle and fine at his hornbeds with those miracle fingers of his, you don’t want to be anything but, not ever again.  

When you said that, he went real red right up to the most top bits of his motherfuckin’ ears, and he shoved you away and ran away like you were a behemoth all getting to rage and trample and shit.  No idea what he had up with him, but he was fucking unsettled of himself and you try not to say stuff like that too much now, to keep him from shovin’ you off and runnin’ again.

Like he can’t get to doin’ now, being as he’s asleep and all.  

You climb up on the couch by him, and even width of a hand apart you can feel the warm in him, all burning like a little heat coil and tingling at your fingers.  When you reach out and pick his arm up a little, he just makes a little noise and shifts all around with this cute-ass little sigh at you.  So you pick his arm up another little way, and you slide up under it and curl yourself up small and tight by his side, squeezed up, pillows and couch-arm behind you and your face up to his thorax under his arm, where the bleatbeast weavings he’s wearing are soft and smell of him and you can hear his big, fast warm pusher pounding away.

You feel small and warmed and you find yourself a place in your pan where you purr low and sweet as you fall asleep beside him.

—

You wake up and the first thing you realize is that you are on your couch, and you have no sopor with you at all.

The second thing you realize is that you didn’t have any nightmares whatsoever.

The third thing is that there is a cool little purring body nestled up against your side.

Gamzee is fast asleep, twitching and shivering a little as he dreams, face pressed into your sweater.  One of his fists is knotted in the front of it, right over your sign; the fingers of the other hand are curled loose, and he chews on his knuckles as he dreams, knees pulled up to his chest and shoulders hunched.  

He’s still wearing one of your sweaters, and the collar gaps in the back, gapes open as his shaggy hair falls to either side to reveal the pale, vulnerable nape of his neck and a hint of a sharp shoulderblade.  The sleeves come down over his hands, your jeans are huge and half-cover his long, bony bare feet and you feel weirdly, abruptly breathless.

You reach down, like you’re still dreaming, like you’re far away from your body, and Gamzee shivers all over and whimpers in his sleep when you trail your claws around the base of one of his delicate horns, and you want to lay him out and touch him gently until he can’t even form words anymore, want to hold his sleeping body and have him trust you to learn him while he sleeps, while he’s utterly vulnerable, want to…

…you want to…

You want to go and have a really cold shower (ALL ALONE, FUCK FUCK FUCK, ALL ALONE WITH _NOBODY ELSE_ THERE) until the hot, fluttery feeling in your thorax fucks off back to wherever it came from.

You want to lie there and feel his skinny little body curled up next to yours.

You’re weak, and pathetic, and you only last for a few seconds before he nuzzles up against you and makes a sleepy little whimpering sound, and you drop your hands to his horns…and give in.


	4. With Pale Voice and Trembling Hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Helpless she lies across the stairs  
> Haunting your days, consuming your prayers.  
> There will be healing, but don't force this girl to stand  
> As she's counting the ceilings with pale voice and trembling hand  
> \-- _For Those Below_ , Mumford and Sons

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Illustrations by the wonderful Fayghost/Momo/Gamzee, whose art is a constant inspiration. I wrote this fic and they illustrated it, while I wrote a fic for a picture they made for me (Eight Days A Week). 10/10, would make Gamkar with again. ;)

You’re going to go fucking insane.

That’s what’s going to happen; your creepy fucked-up pan is going to overheat until it comes pumping out through your auricular sponge-clots and you’re going to do something completely inappropriate like roll over and shit on the floor or do a funny dance and combust.

Or, god forbid, you’re going to grab your scrawny, helpless little twig of a hivemate by the horns again and this time you’re not going to tear your fronds away from him when he goes limp and helpless under your touch.

Because you’re shit.  And a pervert.  And every mutant, fucked up instinct you have is screaming at you to take advantage of his vulnerability and you are  _not going to do it,_  you have some standards.  You fucked up enough when you brought him back to your hive to take care of him when he was sick, when you (tenderly oh god oh god) wiped his face-paint off and put cold water on his feverish face and when you polished his horns for him (oh god why did you do that why is past you such a shit-guzzlingidiot).  And no matter how hard you resist you can’t just shut off the part of you that flips over and shivers deep on your insides when you see him curled up on your couch in one of your too-big sweaters, coughing and still weak.

Gamzee isn’t helping.

“…hey, best friend,” is his favored introduction, and you turn and look at him on this particular night without much patience, because Sollux is a piece of shit and Nepeta won’t stop sending you winky faces and now that blueblood asshole Equius is sending his nightly hate to your computer instead of Gamzee’s. (Besides, you were just starting in on some really quality romantic diamond porn and there isn't a chance in hell you're watching it when he might hear.)  

Gamzee doesn’t see you glare at him—he’s coughing roughly into one hand.

“…what do you want?”  You ask.  “Equius hasn’t messaged you yet—”

“— _no, bro_ ,” he wheezes, and finally his breathing settles a little.  He looks up at you and his eyes are watering purple and something shoots painfully through your thorax.  “…I…I just…” he fidgets.  “…hate to ask, uh…” and he looks up at you again.  Back at his feet.  Up to you.  His cheeks are flushed.  From coughing.  Definitely.  “…all this…coughing shit,” he mumbles, “…getting a terrible aching up in my pan and all and I _..._ I, uh _—_ “

"Get to the point," you say, as authoritatively as you can manage (pretty fucking authoritative because as you realized a long time ago, you were meant for leadership and the fact that he turns purple when he's embarrassed and your blood is ugly swill is not going to stop you being in charge of him.  "I know you get headaches, but contrary to what you apparently fucking believe, you credulous dipshit, I can't make the pain go away just because you don't like--"

"No, bro--" he winces as your voice rises, and you feel an unexpected pang of guilt.  Okay you'll keep your voice down  _a bit_ , but you aren't going to fucking coddle him.  Shit.  "...but you can though _._   Fixed it before, like, got me on them good feelings all put up in my thinkpan."

"Say that again in Alternian."

"Y'know," he says, and he ducks his head toward you a little and all of a sudden you have a horrible, creeping certainty that you know exactly what he's asking you for.

“I—you want me…to touch your horns.” 

Your face burns just saying it, but he just cocks his head to one side and does a sort of little shrug-nod, holy  _fuck_.  “You want me to trigger your submission reflex?!”

“…’s that where the thing in my pan happens?”  He asks.  “All fuzzy-like.”

You don’t trust your mouth to work, so you just nod. 

“…well…yeah, motherfucker,” he says, and—oh god—he eases closer to you and bows his head to you, hair hanging forward into his eyes, fuck  _fuck_  the nape of his neck is bared to you and his eyes are shut and there’s a gap between his back and the collar of your sweater that shows the nobbles of his spine.  “Please?”

He’s  _asking_  for this.  He’s asking you to touch his horns, to do this to him oh god this has to be taking advantage of him--he can’tknow how stupidly intimate this is and how much trust this takes, he should be looking for somebody he can trust and not just coming to you—

“…brother…?”

He looks up at you through his hair and smiles, wide-eyed and nervous and so goddamn idiotically clueless and—and fucking  _sweet._ Vulnerable _._

 _"_ I could, _"_ you start to say, and your mouth is dry and your hands are already rising toward him as he edges closer, smiling up at you with that guileless grin.  "--wh-when you're like that--do you even fucking understand--that shit's  _dangerous_ , Gamzee--"

"Aw well fuck, bro," he says, and for a second you think he's going to sit up and you don't know whether you're relieved or  bereft, your traitorous, disgusting pusher is doing weird shit inside you.  "...ain't even a thing to worry on, all that danger and shit.  I got you here what looks after me so fine and all."

And then while you’re staring at him like an idiot with your mouth hanging wide open, he leans forward the last few inches between the two of you and presses his horns into your hands, your hands squeeze on instinct, and he crumples up against you and _groans._

“Yeah _,_ ” he murmurs, and pulls himself closer to you, pressing against your hands, taking advantage of your shock to get in your space and purr at you. “Yeah best friend all that hurtin’ shifting itself already, gimme more, bit more—“

Some of the tension _is_ going out of his shoulders.  His breathing seems to have eased off a little bit, too—it wasn’t all that bad tonight, but the wheezy rattle that was there has loosened.  And it.  And.  You.  Well, you just—

If it’s helping him breathe.

You settle in and pretend to yourself that you aren’t remembering your porn videos when you take two solid handfuls of his horns and firmly twist your hands, follow the grain of his horns and rub slowly around the bases.  (No teasing, teasing would be so— _personal_ , just pressure, just enough pressure to fool his body into forgetting the pain—)

"Fuck yes _,_ " he groans, and you freeze because the video you downloaded is still ringing in your ears, ( _fuck yes, so pale for you, please--)_ "--so good brother, that shit feels so fuckin' good--"

Oh god you were doing so goddamn well not thinking about it but he makes this sound like porn, god.  You take your hands away, and he lets out a soft little gasp and presses up toward you, trying to huddle up closer.  He's a bony, cool, shivering weight and the feeling of him there pressed up against you is setting off fireworks all down your spine, taking hold of irrational, emotional, protective instincts older than words and  _yanking_.  

You clench a hand, almost experimental, and Gamzee makes a pitiful little sound—his eyes are fluttering open and shut in slow blinks, but nothing is showing now except a gleam of purple around huge, dark pupils.  His face is flushed across his thin cheekbones and his mouth is slack and open and there’s an awful, tempting gut-level rightness to his weight on your knees and his delicate horns in your hands.  It’s almost physically painful trying to let go, and when you do he groans.

“Brother please _,_ ” he mumbles, and presses himself closer, bares his whole thin throat to you down to his jutting collarbones and it’s like you’re in a goddamn romance novel—god that’s so _romantic,_ that’s so fucking romantic and he can’t possibly understand—“ _—_ best friend, make that hurting shit stop _—_ “

"Uh _\--_!" you say, and you'll deny to your death how much it comes out as a squeak.  

“ _…’lest…”_ His voice is so soft you can’t make out what he’s saying, and he puts an arm out to wrap around your waist, pulling you closer, pressed up against your stomach.  You should be nervous with his teeth so close to your belly but he wouldn’t hurt you.  He wouldn’t.  Not Gamzee.

“I can’t tell what you’re saying, bulgemunch,” you say shakily, and squeeze awkwardly at his horns and some detached part of you wants to giggle hysterically at how that makes him shudder all over.  “Speak up.”

“ _Palest,_ ” he gasps, and every muscle in your body stops working all at once.  “—palest and motherfucking dearest best friend, fuck, ahhh best friend…”

You push yourself back on the couch and shove him away from you, breathing harder and faster than you really should be and not caring.  He jumps and grunts as you knee him in the stomach in your haste to get away, but you force yourself not to apologize, not to be sorry because sorry is too close to caring and caring is too close to pity goddammit _goddammit._

“Why—“ your throat is so dry.  “—wh-why are you—calling me that, what the fuck are you talking about?”

He blinks at you, and his confusion is just another sign of what you already knew, of how much he _doesn’t understand_ this and how incapable he is of—of knowing what he wants!  You can’t just pick somebody to call pale because you like how it feels when they rub your horns, there has to be something there and he can’t—he’s not—

…he can’t be.  This tiny, bony nobody with his withered horns and his ocean eyes and his fronds wasted like brittle sticks from the sopor—this _highblood_ with teeth too big for his smile and a cough that makes you want to curl him up and not let go--holy fuck, you can’t _._   He can’t, not you, you’re awful and doesn’t he even get that?  Doesn’t he understand how much you fucked it up with him, that you can’t ever fix it?

“…you all takin’ care of me and all,” he says, and blinks at you like it’s as simple as that.  “You getting’ your hold on good and tight of me when I get bad dreams climbin’ up to my pan—”

"I--I'm not--I can't be your goddamn moirail!"

He stares at you for a long second, then, slowly, opens his mouth.  But it’s not to question the word, it’s not to say _I wasn’t asking you to be, you pretentious waste of blasphemous blood_ , he just cocks his head on one side at you.

"...why?"

You flounder.  It's just--it's a feeling, it's a bone-deep knowledge, you can't do this.  You don't deserve to have that kind of trust put in you, especially not after you let him come onto you when he didn't know what he was doing, after you cleaned him up and stroked his sleeping, sweat-drenched face.

"I don't," you start, and his eyes stay fixed on you, sharp and wide and worried.  "I'm not--I fucked up, okay, but I'm not taking advantage of you like that!"

His forehead wrinkles up, and he's huddling down in your too-big sweater and you feel like dying.  

"What?" he says slowly, finally.  "No, but--brother--" but then he tries to take a deep breath, and all of a sudden he's coughing again, those wet, racking little coughs that make him shudder and clutch at his thorax.  You start to lean forward, grab his shoulder, steady him through it like you've grudgingly done for days.

You stop yourself.  He’ll fix it himself.  He’ll take care of himself! He’ll be _fine_.  You clench your hands at your sides and lean back, and for a second you hurt inside, because he’s coughing and coughing and he can’t stop and when you don’t reach for him he looks fucking betrayed. 

No, it’s worse than that.  He looks _hurt._ He looks up at you through watering eyes, struggling for air, and his face is a mask of fear and pain and it feels like something literally impales you.  It fucking  _aches_  all the way through you.

" _\--Karkat,_ " he croaks, and losing that precious air is enough to set him coughing again, wheezing.  The more he panics the worse he gets and it's not just the coughing; his breaths get tighter and tighter the more he struggles, every thrash seems to squeeze his throat until his inhales are tight, whistling gasps.  

Wait no, fuck, he’s not getting it under control.  He’s losing this, getting worse and worse, and the more he coughs the more he panics and the tighter his breathing gets—

You reach forward and take his shoulders and he tenses up and then, slowly, relaxes.  His face turns back up to you—you see surprise and then a sort of sharp realization and then disappointment and pain and resignation.  Fucking hell.  Fucking _hell._

“We’ll talk about it later,” you say, and he squeezes his eyes shut and catches on a rattling exhale, half-coughing the air out.  “Don’t worry about it now, especially if it’s going to make you pop your aeration sponges in your thorax in a shower of blood like gross—fuck no, shhh, _shh_. That’s not going to happen you idiot, you _idiot_ , you’re just fucking _fine_.”

He makes a noise, just barely a whimper—starts forward like he wants to press up against you again and then…hesitates. 

You rub his tiny, shaking shoulders awkwardly and rack your thinkpan trying to remember the stuff you grudgingly looked up about how to deal with his gross lung shit.  “ _Calm down,_ ” you order, and his hands find your arms, he still won’t get close to you but his shaking claws dig at your side and your shoulder.  “Fucking hell!  Gamzee for fuck’s sake, _breathe._   Uh…in…through your nose, out through your mouth.”

He tries to follow orders, you can tell, you can see him trying; he gets in one short, tight breath through his nose, but when he tries to let it out again he catches on a rough cough, spasms forward hard and sharp against your shoulder and makes a noise that’s really like a whimper, sobbing out those awful, jagged coughs one after another.  There’s not much you can do ( _what can you do, god what are you supposed to_ do?) but you squeeze him and pat his back and tell him _breathe, just breathe you idiot, keep breathing_ , and he struggles to do what you tell him and really, really slowly, his breaths start to get longer and less painful. 

And then you open your stupid mouth.

“Well that was fucking awful,” you grumble, and his face twitches in what might be a weak attempt at a smile.  “Seriously, how the hell are you going to survive when you go back to your hive?”

You know instantly you’ve fucked up.  He goes tense and still all over, opens his mouth to say something, but all that comes out is a high, panicky whine and every inch of ground he had to fight to get back is gone again in a second, he’s choking again, breathless.  “Fuck,” you say, and oh god he legitimately can’t breathe he can’t _breathe_ he’s making noises like he’s dying and you wouldn’t be surprised if it was totally goddamn true—“—no, fuck I’m not gonna send you back right now or anything I just—“

His skin is icy and clammy with sweat and the feeling of it under your skin triggers something—a thought, a memory, another bullet point on some stupid website full of mediculling advice you mostly didn’t get.  There’s no time to think about it, not with him making noises like that—you grab him off the couch, squeeze him close once and feel him huddle closer in response, and take off for your ablutions block.

You have to lay him out on the floor to get a hand free to turn on the water, and when you stop touching him he gets even worse—he doesn’t have the air or the strength left for much, but he spasms weakly and half-raises an arm to reach after you, mouth opened silently wide, eyes watering.  You pick him back up as soon as the water’s on and heating—hesitate.

“Hot,” you say like a moron, “—hot, fuck, hot water, uh—“ he doesn’t even look like he’s listening; his eyes are shut, his head is flopped limply to one side, his cheeks are patchy purple with the effort of breathing.  “—the steam should help,” you say pointlessly, god, your tongue feels clumsy and numb, your heart’s beating so fast— “…oh god bro, hang in there okay?”

You manhandle your sweater off of him and shove him in the spray, ignoring the way it splatters over you and soaks your head and shoulders.  He cringes back and makes an awful noise, keening and breathless—you feel the burn of too-hot water and slap out for the thermal regulation knob and the water slowly cools down to something more tolerable. 

As soon as the pain stops, Gamzee slumps, worn out, too tired to keep struggling, barely breathing and still as a dead thing in the slowly-rising steam.  His eyes are slits, his pupils are tiny and his thorax trembles with every gasp for air.  It’s utterly pathetic.

You get an arm behind his back and rub a hand (hopefully) soothingly over his chest and he closes his eyes and tries to stay alive.  He’s swaying on his feet—you lower him down onto his knees with you, because fucking hell you’re not sure he can support even his paltry weight and if you collapse you’re taking him down with you anyway.

“In through your nose _,_ ” you tell him again, because what the fuck else can you do, seriously.  “ _—_ out through your mouth.Shh.”

The steam and the heat and your frantic, slightly hysterical calming seem to help.  At first you can’t even see it making a difference, but then he gets a real breath in and then another one all the way in and then back out and then again and again and again…

By the time the water starts to run cooler, he’s breathing again.  It’s shallow, slow, careful, like anything could send him choking again and he knows it, but he’s getting the air in and out and his face is slowly losing that blotchy purple flush of strain.  He opens his eyes for just a second, blinking blearily; his eyes are bloodshot and awful, and he can’t keep them open long enough to really focus on you.

He’s soaking wet and shivering and his arms are purple from the hot water.  He huddles up against you and takes careful, slow breaths, one at a time, a drenched, shaking little body that you _have to fucking take care of, you have to you have to stop him from doing that again_ you have to keep him from ever making that noise, that noise that would be a whimper but he can’t breathe, a sob but without air. 

You squeeze him so tight your arms ache and both of you just take deep breaths and don’t say a word.

You don’t realize he’s fallen asleep on you until he starts growling—and even then it takes you a few seconds to recognize the noise for what it is.  He’s still so breathless and his thorax is so worn out, the growl sounds more like a long, desperate groan.  He twitches slightly against your shoulder as he dreams, and you know he’s getting those godawful daymares just like you do, all screaming and gore and _fight fight fight kill fight survive_ FIGHT—

You pick him up and he tries to struggle but he’s barely got the strength after an attack like that to inconvenience you.  You get him up the stairs with no more than a few prickling clawlines on your arm, a haphazard half-bite on your shoulder that didn’t even break skin, and then you stop at the mouth of your ‘coon and...hesitate.

What’s even stopping you?  That you’ve never put him to ‘coon in your own block before?  That he’s still wearing your oversized jeans, when to get the most out of the sopor fastest he should be in his underthings ( _or nothing shut up shut up shut UP—_ )?  That you just realized what an unbelievable fuck-up you are all over again?

You slide him into the sopor still in your baggy jeans, half-turn….and stop again.  Turn back.

He’s still sleeping, but he shifts a little bit and murmurs something indistinct when you scoop up a handful of sopor and rub it across his hitching thorax, up the sides of his neck and then, face burning, comb the cool slime through his hair with your fingers. 

You have to keep your eyes shut when you rub it in on the skin around his horns, and the soft little sounds he makes still make you shudder and bite the inside of your cheek. 

He opens his eyes for just a second, bloodshot and watery, and for a second you can’t bring yourself to feel guilty, even with your sopor-slick fingers on his horns.  “No,” you tell him, rough but gentle.  “Sleep.”

Gamzee sleeps.

\--

By the next night when he wakes up, of course, you’ve managed to work yourself up into an anxious, self-hating froth again and when crabdad comes chittering excitedly down the stairs at you to let you know your guest is awake you consider just…not going.  But he’s your responsibility somehow, and you don’t want him to wake up and trail slime all over your block looking for the load gaper or some shit, so you square your shoulders, bolster your courage (why would you even fucking need to be courageous, goddammit you’re not _doing_ anything--) and head up the stairs.

He’s up when you get there, halfway out of the ‘coon and sliding awkwardly down the side to yawn painfully and stretch all his bony little limbs and he’s so small you could crumple him up like wet paper.  You can see all of his thoracic struts.

You clench your hands at your sides and don’t imagine how it would feel to count them one by one with your fingertips.

“Don’t fall over,” you order him off-handed, and he jumps a little and turns to see you in the door.  His face does that thing where it cycles from surprised to pleased to hesitant to distant to tight with realization and then settles on a sort of resigned, painful smile.  Holy shit, he’s like words on a page he’s so goddamn easy to read.  Either he wasn’t this easy when he was on sopor or he just never had many emotions beyond that stupid easy smile and a sleepy _okay bro, whatever you say._  

“Karkat,” he says, opens his mouth again.  Closes it.  “…hey,” he settles on finally, half-assed and uncertain.

“You’re not gonna fall over and die this time, are you?” you ask, and he winces a little even when his smile widens a little. “Should you even be up?”

“ _Mm,_ ” he goes, gritty and tiny.

You’re not nearly as sure as he is, and he doesn’t seem all that sure, but you’re not going to tell him to go back to the ‘coon.  You frown at him.

“Good,” you say, firm and leaderly as all fuck, “—then we have to talk about shit.”

Gamzee’s smile falls.

“You do have to go back,” you point out, first things first, and then, before he can panic again and undo all his hard-won stability, “—eventually.  Not now, but you can’t just _stay_ here—fuck, like you need telling.  You know you can’t just stay here with me forever.”

“But I,” he says.  God, he sounds like somebody has applied surface-distressing smoothing paper to his throat.  “—But bro I wanna…motherfuckin’ _be_ like this, with you.  For-fuckin’-ever, best friend, ‘palest’ was shit I _meant_ at saying to you—”

Your totally calm and leaderly attitude snaps in half.  “Do you even know what it _means—_ ” you have to take a couple of slow breaths.  “—Gamzee holy fuck, it’s more than just…what do I even— _fuck._ ”

 _(palest and dearest—_ )

“…just thought,” he says, voice tiny.  “Just.  Thought—you all takin’ care and—when I get all fucked up of fear I won’t get breathing again and I wanna do shit I won’t be chill with after I do it, you stand there all big and warm like you do and I—you—”

( _I get scared I lash out and you’re still here so pale for you I need you so much—_ )

“God,” you say, and the enormity of the whole fucking thing looms over you like a wave, you feel as breathless as he used to sound.  “Oh…my god.  You’re serious.”

He makes a noise more frustrated than you’ve _ever_ heard from him.  “— _brother_ ,” he says sharply, “Motherfucker you don’t even _understand_ the fuck I’m up at right now, I am _surer than you ever heard a motherfucker be._ ”

There’s silence—he coughs again in the quiet, but it doesn’t catch and go on and on—he gets it back under control.

“ _Ain’t the smartest,_ ” he says, quiet.  “…but…best friend.”  He mouths silently for a second and then slumps.  “… _best friend,_ ” he repeats faintly, like that’s all he’s got.  His voice is harsh from coughing.  “—but if you’re waitin’ on what I _want_ —”

“—what it even means—”

“—what I wanted since long fuckin’ time ago, Karkat, brother, motherfuckin’ hell, I—”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” You shout over him, and he winces—his voice has been rising but you haven’t been listening because _goddammit_ where does he get off trying to convince you to do this shit?!  How can he—“What you _want_ —”

“How ‘bout you _listen_ on what I want then _?!”_

Now it’s your turn to flinch.  Gamzee’s voice is still hoarse and thready, weak from the strain of his throat, but it’s loud enough to echo and way louder than you’ve ever heard him before and some kind of sharp, painful emotion keeps forcing its way through the distant, vague expression he usually wears, all that foggy goodwill getting burned off. 

“What you—”

“ _You,_ ” Gamzee hisses, and he has to stop and take a few breaths, desperate gasps, trying to get his breath back.  “— _you_ , motherfucker, ‘s what I got a needing on of, want you to not _stop_ when you just got at makin ‘me feel good and I want you to _stop tellin’ me—_ “  His voice is rising to a breathless whine, you can almost _hear_ his throat tightening up again and the memory of how he sounded yesterday makes your spine burn with fear.  “— _tellin’ me I don’t know what I’m fucking_ about _,_ tellin’ me I don’t know that I fuckin’ _want_ you—!”

It’s fear and pity that moves your hands, but it’s shock that keeps them pressed close and horribly soft against his cheeks. 

Gamzee stares at you.  You stare at Gamzee.  And then you see the heaving of his shoulders and the wideness of his eyes and your hands are moving again without your consent.  You pet his face with fast little desperate movements and he stares at you, eyes all wide and mouth still hanging open to yell.  “ _Shhhh,_ ” you say, and he takes a shuddery breath.  Your hands are trembling, fuck, you can’t make them stop, you can barely feel it, just watch it happen as your fingers trace his thin cheek.  “Shh, no it’s okay, I’ll—don’t you fucking dare, I swear to god Gamzee—”

His hand rises, traces up your arm—

“ _Shoosh_ ,” he echoes back to you, and touches your burning face with a cool hand.  “It’s okay brother, you don’t be cryin’ now, shhh _shh_ —”

“Fuck you,” you croak, and your hand comes down and, hesitating, _shaking_ , frames his throat, the softest, most vulnerable parts of him right there under your hands where your claws could tear into him with a twitch of your fingers.  “I’m not _crying_ , bulge-eater.”

He smiles.  It’s awful.  You can feel him swallow under your fingers.  It’s wonderful.  His expression can’t settle and his eyes glitter way too bright.  It’s terrible.  His hand cups your cheek and his thumb traces your cheekbone.  It’s fucking _amazing._

He doesn’t call you out on the wetness he smears over your cheeks.

“ _…yeah_?” he says, and he’s so.  Fucking.  _Small._ Neither of you can take your hands down from the other’s face and neither of you is sure if they should be there at all and you just sit there, him covered in sopor and you dripping tears off your chin, and stare at each other with each other’s hands cupped around your cheeks.

And then his face twitches and he yawns, long and slow and luxurious, and the moment is broken.  You pull your hands back and scrub at your face.  He pulls away too, but a lot more reluctantly, hands lingering halfway-raised like if you ever show a sign of not minding he’ll go back to touching you instantly.  He looks so eager and so goddamn unsure. 

“…I think,” you say distantly, “…I’ve been kind of a shit-head.”  God, you can’t even think about past you without cringing.  Shouting over him like that when he was trying to tell you what he wanted, what an idiot.  What a terrible, bull-headed, shit-spewing piece of diseased trollflesh. “…we’ll…uh.  We can.  Talk about this later.” And then, a lot more confidently, because you are a goddamn _leader_ and here at least you know what needs to happen.  “—now go the fuck back to sleep.”

Gamzee slumps.  “…okay,” he says, dejected as a kicked barkbeast.  Then he brightens up a little bit.  “—hey but—okay, right.  So…I figure you better make sure I don’t get no slime where it ain’t supposed to go and all.  Being as what that motherfucker made me sick for first and all.”

You squint suspiciously at him, but he just smiles guilelessly back.

“…fine,” says your treacherous mouth, and his face lights up and that’s it.  That’s all, you’re done.  You are a broken troll.

You squeeze down in the slime.  There’s not nearly as much room as there should be—Gamzee has to be pressed up against the wall pretty hard, but he just kind of squirms and buries his face into your shoulder.

(And then, in the silence, you cough.)


End file.
